Configuration

Taskwarrior stores all configuration information in a file in your home directory, named .taskrc. The default .taskrc file contains a minimal set of entries, with only one required setting, which is:

data.location=~/.task

This is the only setting you need because Taskwarrior has senѕible defaults for all the settings. This file is really just a list of settings for which you wish to override those defaults.

Config Command

The config command can be used to modify your .taskrc file. In this example we enable regular expression support in filters, by doing this:

$ task config regex on
Are you sure you want to change the value of 'regex' from 'off' to 'on'? (yes/no) yes
Config file ~/.taskrc modified.

You can use 'on', or '1', 'yes' or 'true', all of which are synonyms which will enable the feature. You are asked to confirm the change, which is controlled by the confirmation setting which of course you can disable with:

$ task config confirmation off

The general form of the command can be either of these:

task config name value
task config name ''
task config name

These three example show, respectively, setting name to value, setting name to an empty value, and deleting the setting. Note that only deleting the setting removes the override and therefore restores the default.

Show Command

The show command displays all the current configuration settings, which is a list of all the settings and default values, with your local settings overriding those, and furthermore with any command line overrides. The show command will also filter the settings by a keyword you specify, so to look at the next report definition, you can run this:

$ task show report.minimal

Config Variable            Value
-------------------------- ----------------------------------------
report.minimal.columns     id,project,tags.count,description.count
report.minimal.description Pending tasks by project and description
report.minimal.filter      ( status:pending or status:waiting )
report.minimal.labels      ID,Project,Tags,Description
report.minimal.sort        project+,description+,entry+

The show command will highlight values that differ from the defaults, and will also tell you if there are settings which are not recognized. This might indicate ѕpelling mistakes or obsolete settings.

Includes

The .taskrc file supports inclusion, which is used for example, for theme files.

include ~/themes/solarized-dark-256.theme

The file included is expected to contain Taskwarrior configuration settings, or nested includes.

Command Line Override

The config command makes permanent changes to your .taskrc files, but you can temporarily override these settings for a single command, using this technique:

$ task rc.regex=on /[Tt]otal/ list

One possible use of this feature is to override the data.location setting to use an alternate task list:

$ task rc.data.location=/alternate/path/.task ...

Environment Variables

There are two environment variables that can be used to specify an alternate configuration file, and an alternate data location.

TASKRC=~/.taskrc TASKDATA=~/.task task list

This example uses environment variables to specify both the configuration file and the data directory.